Paris Peace Accords 23 Oct. 1991

Saturday, April 22, 2017

Lenin and the Russian Spark

A postcard of the Finland Station in St. Petersburg, Russia.PHOTOGRAPH BY LEBRECHT MUSIC AND ARTS PHOTO LIBRARY / ALAMY

Lenin and the Russian Spark

A hundred years ago
this week, a German train that had been secretly carrying Lenin and
other revolutionaries ended its journey in St. Petersburg.

The New Yorker | 20 April 2017

On
April 16, 1917, a short train carrying thirty-two passengers steamed
into one of St. Petersburg’s less distinguished stations, completing an
eight-day journey from Zurich. These passengers were arriving late to a
revolution that had started without them, earlier that year, after food
riots broke out in the imperial capital. But one of them—Vladimir Ilyich
Ulyanov—would quickly seize control of events. By year’s end, he had
launched what would become the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,
which replaced the empire it despised but remained largely within its
geography. Reflecting on these events years later, Winston Churchill
would compare Ulyanov, or Lenin, as he styled himself, to a “plague
bacillus” that had been introduced into a body at precisely the moment
it could do the most harm. The train injected the bacillus late at
night, when it arrived and was greeted by a delirious crowd. The next
day, Lenin was off and running, speaking and writing at a frantic pace,
rejecting compromise, relentlessly pulling the Revolution toward his
hard Bolshevik line.

“To the Finland Station,”Edmund Wilson’s history of socialism, published in 1940, took for its
title the name of the dreary railroad terminal that welcomed Lenin to
St. Petersburg. Serving St. Petersburg since 1870, the year before the
Paris Commune, the station was described by Wilson as “a shabby stucco
station, rubber-gray and tarnished pink, with a long trainshed held up
by slim columns that branch where they meet the roof.” It was not one,
he continued, suited to “the splendors of a capital.” Decades after
Lenin’s arrival, when Wilson was doing his book research, he found
peasant women sitting there, with “bundles and baskets and big
handkerchiefs around their heads,” seated on “benches rubbed dull with
waiting.” Long after the Revolution and all its world-changing promises
had settled into a grim stasis, waiting was still a Russian specialty.

The
train entered Finland Station a hundred years ago this week, and the
end of its voyage marked the beginning of new, seismic events that
reshaped the world as the First World War was ending, unhappily, for
nearly all of its combatants. It’s a centennial that President Vladimir
Putin, no fan of dissent under his own rule, has some ambivalence about commemorating.

A new book by Catherine Merridale, “Lenin on the Train,”
pays careful attention to the secret rail journey through Germany,
Sweden, and the Grand Duchy of Finland that brought Lenin to his
destination. A hundred years ago, Russians reeled from a war that was
going poorly, a tsar, Nicholas II, who was failing, and the constant
threat of invasion and intervention. Lenin’s arrival in 1917 was
orchestrated by cynical German leaders who were eager to weaken Russia’s
fragile government by sending in a well-known incendiary element, in
order to inflame tensions that were becoming acute thanks to
catastrophic military defeats, a long history of suppressing dissent,
and the simple lack of food. Lenin’s first newspaper had been called Iskra,
or “spark,” after a line one poet, Alexander Odoevsky, wrote in
response to another, Pushkin:“from a spark a fire will flare up.”

That
is precisely how it turned out. Lenin was quite willing to accept help
from his sworn enemies, although he went to some lengths afterward to
cover up the German origins of the plan. Later, it was important to him
to call it a sealed train—a phrase that became famous in
history. It described a train passing through Europe secretly, in a
state of extraterritoriality, without passport controls, almost as if it
did not exist. It just glided quietly through the cities of war-torn
Europe, under German protection, carrying its deadly cargo toward
Germany’s weakened adversary on the Eastern Front.

Map by Catherine Merridale and Frank Payne, from Catherine Merridale’s “Lenin on the Train” (Metropolitan, 2017).

Churchill’s
image of Lenin as a bacillus had a certain resonance for other reasons:
the occupants were quarantined on the train, as if it carried a rare
disease. Almost no one was allowed to get on or off. Stefan Zweig, the
Austrian essayist, called it a “projectile,” as if it were a canister
filled with sarin. The little band of revolutionaries who boarded at
Zurich had only each other, as they passed through one city after
another: Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Berlin. True, there were German soldiers
watching their every move, but they stayed in a forward part of the
train car, separated by a line of chalk drawn on the floor, which served
as an international border between “Russia” and “Germany,” two nations
that were technically at war and could not speak to each other. Lenin
tried to avoid leaving his carriage, to be able to say later that he had
never set foot in Germany, but in Frankfurt the band of passengers
secretly stepped off the train to spend the night.

The
United States also had something to do with the decision to send the
sealed train on its journey, albeit indirectly. Ten days earlier, on
April 6th, Congress had declared war on Germany.The imminent arrival of
American arms and men promised to transform a war now in its third
year, and to bring enormous resources to bear on the Western Front. As a
result, Germany was desperate to finish off its huge enemy to the east,
and eager to try anything. Maxim Litvinov, a Soviet diplomat, later
said that the decisive factor that led the Germans “to authorize the
passage of our comrades was the entry of the United States into the
war.” Still, the success of the plan surprised all of its authors,
including its central protagonist. A day before he left, Lenin was still
trying to round up support, and telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Bern. A
young staffer answered, but, to him, the matter did not seem urgent—he
was on his way to play tennis—and he told Lenin to call back the next
day. That return call never came; the staffer, Allen Dulles, went on to
become the head of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Throughout
the winter, Lenin had been quietly living in Zurich with his wife,
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, of very little concern to anyone,
banished indefinitely from his homeland. They lodged with a cobbler and
rarely went out. The great revolutionary was something of a bookworm,
going to the public library every day when it opened at nine, coming
home to his tiny apartment for lunch at 12:10, and going back to the
library from 1 P.M. until closing. There, he read
longingly of earlier revolutions—the Paris Commune above all—and wrote
inflammatory articles that were read by tiny numbers of purists, equally
far removed from the action. But his own revolution seemed to be
receding. He was getting older, and he thought it would be many years
before Russia was ready. Krupskaya later wrote, “Never, I think, was
Vladimir Ilyich in a more irreconcilable mood than during the last
months of 1916 and the early months of 1917.” “We old folks may not live
to see the decisive battles,” he admitted glumly in a January
speech. He felt “corked up, as if in a bottle,” his wife said.

On
March 15th, the day he heard the news that food shortages had led to
chaos in Russia, he was stunned, and walked to the lakefront in Zurich,
where newspapers were publicly posted. There, for the next few days, he
received the vertiginous news. The tsar had abdicated! Up was down, and
vice versa. Could he go back now? A new world was opening up. It was
almost surreal.

In fact, the word
“surrealism” was coming into existence at exactly that moment, one of
the many ways in which artists and writers were trying to invent what
Guillaume Apollinaire, the inventor of the word, called a “New Spirit.”
To a surprising degree, Zurich, the Swiss city we think of as home to
banks and burghers, was also a fountain of creativity, embracing
irrationality even more passionately than Paris did. From around Europe,
expatriates had descended upon Zurich to escape the horrors of the war.
Not far from Lenin’s flat, James Joyce was writing word symphonies into
his “Scribbledehobble” notebook and beginning to write “Ulysses.”
A few streets away, another word, “Dada,” had been coined to describe
the deliberate nonsense one group of spirited artists wanted to create,
reading poems full of words that they invented on the fly,
choreographing Dada dances, and spending much time, the way artists do,
in a local café that they called the Cabaret Voltaire. They chose the
word “Dada” because it meant so many things in so many different
languages—a rocking horse in French, or “yes, yes” in Romanian and
Russian.

Yes, yes. The tsar had abdicated! Through all the noise and nonsense, it was becoming clear. Lenin had to
get back to Russia; he wrote a friend, “We have to go by some means,
even if it is through Hell.” But how? Briefly, Lenin toyed with the idea
of renting an airplane and simply flying over Europe to land in Russia.
Such a death-defying act might have made him the greatest Dadaist of
them all. But it was not feasible in 1917, and he sulked, furious that
the Revolution had started without him.

Across
the Atlantic Ocean, another banished expatriate, this one in New York
City, was also absorbed in the news from his homeland. Each day in the
early spring of 1917, Leon Trotsky would commute from the Bronx to a
tiny basement newspaper office at 77 St. Mark’s Place, in the East
Village. Within a year Trotsky would become, with Lenin, the other
architect of Russia’s transformation into the Soviet Union. One of the
more sublime headlines that would appear in a year full of them
displayed New York’s robust self-absorption for all to see: BRONX MAN LEADS RUSSIAN REVOLUTION.

To
call Trotsky a Bronx Man was an exaggeration—his passage through the
borough was brief. But it was meaningful, as a recent book, Kenneth D.
Ackerman’s “Trotsky in New York, 1917,” reveals. Trotsky and Lenin had known each other a long time, as allies and rivals, since the old days of Iskra—the spark. Trotsky had arrived in New York on January 14th, after being expelled from France and Spain, and found work at Novy Mir,
a tiny Russian newspaper that was sold for a penny around the East
Village and the Lower East Side. Remarkably, it employed not only
Trotsky but Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, who would go on to become
another important leader of the Russian Revolution until, like Trotsky,
he fell to Stalin’s purges.

The offices of Novy Mir.PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

Despite its high-octane Bolshevism, Novy Mir was
quite happy to accept advertisements from Budweiser, tobacco companies,
phonograph manufacturers, banks, and other pillars of the American
economy. That helped to pay the staff, who scrounged for lodgings where
they could. The Trotsky family found a three-room apartment that cost
eighteen dollars a month just west of the Bronx River, near the
174th Street subway stop on the old Third Avenue El. On his way to work,
Trotsky often stopped at small deli in the Bronx, the Triangle Dairy
Restaurant, which was serviceable for a cheap meal.

On March 15th, the news of the tsar’s abdication crossed the Atlantic and reached Trotsky in the Novy Mir
office. Across New York’s Russian districts—including places where huge
numbers of Jews who had fled the tsar’s pogroms had settled—the news
spread rapidly from window to window, across the clotheslines and fire
escapes. Like Lenin, Trotsky knew immediately that he must return. But
to cross the North Atlantic in the spring of 1917 was no simple matter,
especially in his case. In addition to the German submarines, there were
the British and the French, who were in no hurry for the Russian
Revolution to begin, since Russian troops were desperately needed on the
Eastern Front. Trotsky made it on a ship to Halifax, Nova Scotia, but
was detained there for a month before international pressure finally
compelled the British to release him and let him continue east.

Lenin’s
voyage was simpler, because the Germans wanted this projectile to
gather speed and destroy Russia once and for all. The fastest way to
introduce him into Russia’s bloodstream was by rail. Lenin had been
denouncing the railroad as an instrument of oppression, and the
“summation of the basic capitalist industries, coal, iron and steel.”
But it was efficient. Because the trip took place on a German train, we
have a fairly good idea of the timetable. What the Germans called der Russenzug—the Russian train—left Zurich at 3:10 P.M. on April 9th. As Stefan Zweig wrote, “It was 3:10, and since then the world clock has kept different time.”

Accommodations
were ordinary: a wooden carriage, painted green, with two toilets and a
baggage room. In one of his earliest official decisions, the future
leader of the Soviet Union decreed a system of tickets to the single
toilet. Those using the toilet to smoke were given “second-class”
tickets, and had to wait behind those who needed it for more basic
purposes. It was a long journey, interrupted by occasional stops, when
the train would be guided into a siding and the authorities asked
questions in whispers. North of Berlin, the train became an amphibious
vehicle, as the carriage was separated from its locomotive and placed on
a ferry to cross the Baltic. In Sweden, the plans were nearly derailed
because the extraterritorials had no papers; but German efficiency took
over again, and soon they were on their way. In Stockholm, a memorable
photograph was taken during a rare descent from the train, showing Lenin
walking fast, with an umbrella and derby, looking more burgher-like
than usual.

From Stockholm, the
train proceeded very far to the north, nearly to the Arctic Circle,
before crossing into the Grand Duchy of Finland and curving south again,
toward St. Petersburg. It was 11 P.M. on April 16th when
Lenin approached the Finland Station. A marching band was on hand to
play “La Marseillaise” and other songs of the revolutionary left; a
triumphal arch had been built, and a large crowd came out to welcome
Lenin back. The scene was carefully re-created twenty years later by a
Soviet artist, Mikhail Sokolov—so carefully, in fact, that he inserted
someone who was not there at all, but needed to be: Josef Stalin,
smiling, just behind Lenin.

In
a Soviet painting from 1935, Lenin arrives at the Finland Station in
Petrograd, April, 1917. Josef Stalin, who was not actually present, is
fictitiously depicted standing behind Lenin.PHOTOGRAPH FROM GRANGER

Not
everything changed overnight. The carnage of the war did not slacken
simply because they had made it through the lines. But Lenin deftly took
advantage of the public’s exhaustion with the war, demanded that Russia
stop fighting, and turned his attention to the bitter struggle for
power that followed the tsar’s abdication. It might have gone in many
different directions—the United States was hopeful that a proud new
democracy was beginning, and was the first to recognize the early
post-tsarist government of Alexander Kerensky. But Lenin and his
allies—including Leon Trotsky, who finally made it back—carried the day
and built something very different, a new kind of state that the world
had never seen. For many Russians, exhausted by war and privation, it
was a time of immense hope. The Germans who had sent Lenin were also
hopeful. Soon after his arrival, a German diplomat in Sweden wrote a
note to a colleague: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is
working exactly as we would wish.”

Not
long after his return, Lenin wrote that “there are no miracles in
nature or in history,” but he admitted that, now and then, “peculiar
co-ordinations” occur that “must appear miraculous to the burgher’s
mind.” So his train journey to the Finland Station may have seemed,
even to him; the remarkable result of a series of secret cables, passed
between allies and enemies, which resulted in the complete
transformation of the world’s largest country. And, by extension, the
rest of the world, for the huge fact of Russia was never possible to
ignore, then or now.

On November 7,
1917, Leon Trotsky coined a phrase that historians still use, in his
angry remarks to the Mensheviks as they departed the second All-Russian
Congress of Soviets, in St. Petersburg, leading to the victory of the
Bolsheviks. “Go where you belong from now on—into the dustbin of
history!”

Just who belongs in the
dustbin and who does the sweeping up changes over time. In 2009, a bomb
blew open a hole in the backside of Lenin’s statute outside the Finland
Station. In recent weeks, young people have been demonstrating against
Russia’s leader and his tsar-like pretensions, his suppression of
freedoms, and his cynical foreign policy. A hundred years after Lenin
arrived at the station, the dust particles continue to fall from the
explosions of 1917.

Ted Widmer is the director of the John W. Kluge Center at the
Library of Congress. He has taught history at Washington College and
Brown University. His next book, “Lincoln on the Verge: An Odyssey by
Rail,” will be published by Simon and Schuster.

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